Month: May 2016

Nearly 900 mods already available for Xbox One. The top ones have been downloaded in the hundreds, at last count.

Xbox One owners can now download mods for Fallout 4. There are 885 available already and the servers for the game’s creators at Bethesda seem to be struggling to keep up . The most mod for the game on Xbox One is a cheat menu that lets you add caps, stimpacks and more. That’s currently a little more popular than “Busty Enhanced Vanilla Body replacer.” There are cat mods and gun mods, too, of course.

To get the mods, you need to either go to the mod section on Bethesda.net or log into the game and check out the mod menu. You may run into error messages, since Bethesda seems to be getting hammered.

As long as the servers are working, you’ll be able to click on mods you’re interested in, read about them, download them and pick the order you want them to load. Bethesda will let you download up to 2GB worth of mods. That cheat menu one is just 117.3 KB. A mod called Re-Growth that changes the game’s foliage is 287.8MB.

The notes for Re-Growth hint at some of the limitations console owners are going to have with mods as they’re funneled through Bethesda’s website (emphasis added):

ReGrowth overhaul originated on PC, as most mods do. It’s a (fairly) popular flora mod, that originally aimed to “overgrow” the world. Unfortunately because of console limitation. the FULL version can’t be uploaded on Beth.net, however I was able to upload the “Flora” only version. This version of the mod will deliver mostly the same experience as the full version. For example, you’ll get the tree’s, flowers, grass, and other flora related textured, but you won’t get overgrown buildings, mossy roads, and vined walls. All in all, it’s the perfect balance for consoles. Both eyecandy, and functional.

Re-Growth has been downloaded 340 times. The cheat code one, which is called Cheat Menu (Portable Holotape Menu), has been downloaded 613 times. The big-breasts one has been downloaded 439 times.

That busty mod is the closest we’ve found to a nudity mod, which of course we looked for to see how permissive Bethesda was going to be. In an FAQ, the modder says:

We haven’t been able to test the mods on Xbox One, because our biggest Fallout-playing folks on staff don’t have the game on that console and/or aren’t near an Xbox One today, leaving me with a copy of the game on Microsoft’s console, no save file and no time to jump in and test (Bad timing meets division of labor: if there are any mods for the new Kirby game, I can check that!).

It doesn’t help that Bethesda.net has been struggling to keep with the demand. I had Fallout 4‘s mod menu loaded for all of 10 minutes and lost connection to the Bethesda server twice.

Hopefully the mods work. Cross fingers! It’s not clear how much testing the mods get and how well they’ll work with each other. Modder notes include suggestions about the order to load them for better performance.

If you use any, Achievements will be turned off. It’s only fair. Or something.

All these caveats and qualifications aside, it’s impressive to see even a fraction of the mods coming to a console game. It’s such a rare sight in the walled lands of non-PC gaming. It’s also exciting, because, if this works and if interesting enough mods can make it through Bethesda’s site, these mods are going to add a lot of life to the console versions of Fallout 4.

“It’s spectacular,” Raines said, after host Liz Claman referred to the game as “scenery porn.”

“I’ve played all the Uncharted series [games] and they’re all spectacular. One just gets better than the other. Naughty Dog has done a spectacular job again,” he added. “The character development is rich. It’s a little bit of a Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure. It’s a fantastic game and has sold through well for us. We love Sony first-party games, anyway; always have.”

Overall, Raines said GameStop is “very happy” with how Uncharted 4 is performing for the company. He added that it’s helped sell more PlayStation 4 consoles, while GameStop has also been able to move a “fair amount of digital content” for the game.

Also in the interview, Raines said he expects there to be announcements about virtual reality and new gaming consoles at E3 in June. “We’re gonna hear about that at E3,” he said.

Highlight Reel is Kotaku’s regular roundup of great plays, stunts, records and other great moments from around the gaming world. If you record an amazing feat while playing a game (here’s how to record a clip), send it to us with a message confirming that the clip is yours at highlightreel@kotaku.com. Or, if you see a great clip around that isn’t yours, encourage that person to send it in!

The Geforce GTX 1080 tops the performance of the $600 Titan X card for $700. The Geforce GTX 1070 basically matches it for under $400. That’s just nuts.

Easily living up to the label of the most powerful graphics card yet, the Pascal powered Geforce GTX 1080 has been getting the lion’s share of attention since Nvidia announced it earlier this month. But the benefits of more efficient operation, smaller die size and advanced architecture were also gifted to the Geforce GTX 1070. It may not be Nvidia’s new flagship card, but it still keeps pace (and sometimes surpasses) the company’s former flagship at less than half the cost.

By jumping ahead to technology generations, Nvidia has stomped all over its previous power elite. The poor, poor Titan X, with its $1,000 plus price tag, is going to need a substantial discount if anyone is going to buy one once the Geforce GTX 1070s drop on June 10.

I had some time to play with the Founder’s Edition Geforce GTX 1070 over the past week, removing the 1080 I’d reviewed previously and replacing it with a less powerful card, which is never a good feeling. It helped that the exterior of the card is essentially the same faceted deign of its big brother.

It’s quite a bit different on the inside, however. The vapor chamber cooling system of the 1080 is replaced with a heat pipe assembly. While the 1070 is based on the same GP104 GPU as the 1080, it’s got fewer CUDA cores to play with (1920 versus 2560), fewer texture units (120 versus 160) and boasts slower clock speeds (core 1506 MHz versus 1607 MHz.) And while the 1080 features new 10Gbps GDDR5X memory, the 1070 sticks with 8GB of good old GDDR5 running at 8Gbps. Check out full specs at Nvidia’s official page.

Despite the hardware differences, the GTX 1070 is still a Pascal-based graphics card, featuring all of the bells and whistles that comes with—simultaneous multi-projection, fast sync for older games that want to run way too speedy, support for Nvidia’s Ansel 360 degree screenshot technology and a relatively easy overclocking experience (as long as you don’t mind fan noise).

So while the GTX 1070 might not be quite as advanced as the more expensive 1080, it still delivers next-generation GPU technology at a much nicer price.

Mind you the Founder’s Edition card I played with runs $450 as part of Nvidia’s ‘let’s charge more for our reference models’ initiative. Third-party cards are expected to retail at $380, and who knows what sort of bells and whistles they’ll be screwing onto these puppies.

Whether you opt to pay the extra $70 or not, you’re getting an outstanding price versus performance ratio with the Geforce GTX 1070. I tested the same seven games I did with the 1080 on highest settings, and the numbers were pretty much on par with benchmarks for the $1,000 Geforce GTX Titan X.

Once again I didn’t bother listing 1920 x 1080 scores, as the 1070 readily surpassed the 60 frames per second target for everything I threw at it—even Metro Last Light, the most dickish of benchmarks.

Take a look.

Passable 2560 x 1440 performance on all but two games, which again is right on par with the Titan X. It’s nowhere near the 4K powerhouse of the GTX 1080, but for the price it’s still a hell of a card.

Most of the comparison benchmarks at Techspot tell the same tale. The Titan X and its much cheaper sibling neck-and-neck at every turn, with the Radeon R9 Fury X dancing around them.

With a power versus price ratio that’s through the roof, the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 is primed to become one of the most popular graphics cards of this hardware generation. While the GTX 1080 is going to turn a lot of heads, the 1070 is the one that’s going to open wallets.

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